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Everything posted by Craig234

There are two world views at war.
In one, the left's, the people are most important. Their interests. What's good for the broad public - opportunity, money, freedom, civil rights, and a lot more.
In the other, the right's, the people don't matter. Only the few on top matter. The people are just a burden - it's not unlike how a rancher would view animals. At best, the desire is to give them minimal care to profit from them. At worst, they're pests to kill.
Anything the people get more than that, they're merely lucky at the wonderful generosity of those at the top to let them have it, why aren't they more grateful.
Few on the right are as extreme as to actually push that worldview totally, but it does easily justify higher concentration of wealth and power, less for the public's housing/medical care/education etc.
But this is the basic choice - a government that makes the economy and the laws benefit the people broadly, or a government that makes the economy and the laws benefit the few on top and has little to no concern for the rest of the people, at least far less, just trying to get the most productivity for the least expense possible. Which is why wages are flat for decades now.
And this is how to understand right-wing politics - that the issues don't matter for them other than to get votes to get power to get money.
So the left tends to work hard on issues - how can we improve education, how can we improve justice, how can we improve medical care, and so on, while the right's only concern is 'how can we get our servants elected to they can run things for us'. They simply hire candidates, marketing, campaign consultants, to try to win by saying anything that will get them votes.
And this is important to understand, so people aren't trying to take the right's politics seriously as well-intended solutions to issues. They're instead things like smoke screens to justify bad policies or simple pandering.
Just as a few rich people tell young men about patriotism and glory in order to get them to kill and risk their lives in wars for the benefit of the rich, right-wing politics tells voters about things like patriotism and 'conservatism' and falsely uses words like 'morals' to get people to vote for them.

Monarch butterflies are 86% gone in California recently, and on the way to extinction.
Part of 60% of all wildlife globally being gone in the last 50 years. This should be a leading news story every day, and is practically never mentioned.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/07/us/monarch-butterflies-decline-trnd/index.html
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/30/humanity-wiped-out-animals-since-1970-major-report-finds

Remember, impeaching is a political act, and Republicans are utterly corrupt, so no matter how much evidence of crimes Democrats find, it's unlikely Republicans will uphold justice and support impeachment.

There are at least two. One is that studies show that 'illegal immigrants' are a net economic POSITIVE. Between their doing the jobs Americans don't want for low wages, and paying into Social Security where they can never claim the money back, they give more than they get in welfare and expenses. The other is a humanitarian argument.
That's before getting into a topic of how many the US has caused the problems causing many to want to flee. It's useful to note that for years, there has been a net NEGATIVE migration - more Mexicans go from the US to Mexico than from Mexico to the US.
But for people who do come to the US, the US has caused a lot of problems causing people to flee here, including our spending billions on drugs the cartels get, and things like backing the coup in Honduras that installed a repressive regime. So there's a case for progressives to want to help people in their own countries so they don't have to move here.

Right-wingers can't understand the concept of democracy. All they understand is authoritarianism. Ironically, they're fighting for authoritarianism not for themselves but for others who convince them that they should join their team against the rest of the country.

trump and his base want a wall. Democrats and others don't.
Here's the deal.
We have a system of government (just as we have an election system that wrongly distorts the vote so trump won with three million fewer votes). It has a House, a Senate, a President, and requirements for passing spending.
If trump wants his wall, he needs to either win enough elections to get the people needed in all the branches to pass it - just as Democrats had to do to pass things like healthcare for the American people with no Republican votes; or he needs to negotiate with Democrats to get them to agree enough to vote for it. Those are his valid choices.
If he doesn't do those, he doesn't get his wall. Those are the rules, how it works. Democrats don't get all kinds of things they want for the same reason.
What's NOT legitimate is to refuse to fund the government's operation and use the government as a hostage to demand what he can't get legitimately. Same with the rights of dreamers, wrongly take them away and then offer to temporarily restore them in exchange for his demands. More hostage taking.
If he can do that, then every Democratic president should harm Republican innocent people, should shut down the government and take hostages to demand what THEY want.
That's the issue. trump is in the wrong here. If he wants a wall - win elections. Just like Democrats have to. If he hurts innocent people as hostages he gets the blame for it.
That's what's going to happen eventually - he's going to lose. The only question is how much harm he'll do in the meantime, how much political damage he'll cause Republicans, by his hostage taking. His supporters don't seem to understand this: they don't have the power, the numbers, to get their way. They're going to lose. Now, or even worse later.

A confidential memo of trump's notes on his plans for negotiating for anything he wants has been leaked.
"1. Refuse to fund the government operating. Demand they give in to get funding.
2. Refuse to pay Democratic members of Congress until they give in to demands. They think the courts will block this - haven't they been paying attention to the judicial nominees?
3. Refuse to pay the troops. Demand Democrats give in to get them paid.
4. Threaten to move all military and other government activity out of Democratic states and districts unless they give in to demands.
5. Threaten war with countries Democrats love - Canada, France, Sweden - unless they give in to demands."

Pick one or more:
- You hate the environment and want death and ruin for the planet
- You are a science denier who thinks unlimited pollution is not bad for the environment
- You make money by harming the environment and are evil
- You think that only other people will be harmed/killed, not you, and you don't care about them or the animals except any pets you own
- You are a nihilist
- You think the world will be saved by new technology, without any understanding or evidence
That about covers the possible positions for the right-wingers on the environment. They support its destruction and can admit it if they know it or are idiots who fall for lies if they don't.
There aren't many other explanations for why on any issue about harming the environment - oil production, strip mining, fracking, cars, beef production, deforestation, allowing the dumping of industrial waste, weakening of governmental laws and enforcement of them, carbon reduction, overdevelopment, and so on, on every one they are angrily on the side of harming the environment.
About the best they'll do is some limited support of protecting the environment they spend time in. And even that is only sometimes.

We're getting off topic, but the Holocaust used a similar approach of justifying it with claims that Jews and socialists and other targets were a 'threat' to Germany and they were just defending themselves. That led to 'The night of knives' with Germans attacking Jews and their property and then to the holocaust.
As far as 9/11, yes, it's worse than that. Just as trump spitefully does the opposite of Obama, Bush spitefully did the opposite of Clinton warned Bush Al Queda was the #1 threat to watch, and Clinton had been having daily meetings with Richard Clarke about them.
So Bush disbanded the Al Queda unit in the CIA, demoted Richard Clarke, ended those meetings and de-emphasized any concern with Al Queda. His administration said the Clinton administration had been hysterical in their obsession about Al Queda. It could have been found and might not have been because of Bush's choice.

Isn't 'maca root' just an item, not a particular brand, so saying 'eat maca root' is like saying 'eat your veggies' or 'blueberries are good anti-oxidants'?
Not something for a brand, not something Merrill profits from?

I think part of the issue is a sense that the Senate won't convict, and that they might not be able to impeach him again and again as new information about his crimes comes out, so they want to wait for the Mueller report and do it once. Of course, a risk they run is a sense of 'wait for the 2020 election, why impeach him for a short reduction in his time in office'.

That was NOT a reach across the aisle. It was more of his hostage taking and partisanship. He has forced a government showdown, taking the government hostage to demand a ransom of $5 billion for his wall. He is offering a TEMPORARY extension of rights needed for people that he took away in the first place. Democrats must not allow that hostage-taking for him to score political points with his base about a wasteful wall, points he desperately needs in the face of coming accusations for his crimes where his only defense is to try to keep the support of his base.
If you don't understand this, I'll take $100 from you and offer $20 back if you agree to a demand to build a wall I want. Deal?